Lately

November 5, 2012

With so many big things on my mind – Sandy, the election – I’ve needed to look around a little for somewhere to focus. I always land on the small things. So many beautiful thankfulness and gratitude projects are going around this month on blogs and Facebook and Instagram and I thought at first that I’d join in, but the more I thought about it the more I wanted to just have some focus on being present and thankful for the moment as a form of gratitude.

If you’ve followed the blog for a while, I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but somewhere along the line in the past months to a year, I’ve just felt like the mojo was a bit lacking in my photos. I wasn’t picking up my camera for the same reasons as before. I think it started around the time I really started adding business photos into the mix of my photography and it definitely had ties to my own personal forcing myself to focus so much on learning to shoot film.

There’s something to be said for a forced picking-up-the-camera-daily-and-seeking-the-photo, but it just wasn’t feeling right. It felt like pressure to be something I’m not, to try to style things in just a certain way and shoot things and certain way and it’s just not me. I respect and admire and massively enjoy everyone with amazing styling skills for all that they convey in their homes and in their work, but it’s just not me. I don’t ever want this blog to feel contrived, or like a space that’s styled or staged, because it just isn’t.

At the end of October, I started picking up the camera and trying to find something real each day. The official start of habit for November sparked something that I’ve been needing to feel for a long time. It doesn’t feel forced and it doesn’t feel like a chore. It feels like picking up the camera and capturing our everyday because the moments matter to me and are something I want my children to see down the road. Things that might spark a memory for them or show them a way that I loved them by viewing their sweetness and their real everyday life with a little bit of rawness through a camera lens and that feels good. Things that border on too personal to post because I am a private person and it makes me feel a bit vulnerable to put it out there. But there’s something to be said, a lot really, for being willing to be vulnerable in order to share a bit more truth.

It’s so good to feel like there’s a little bit more motivation to pick up a camera again.

The last photograph of your family with the word Open illuminated above them – love that! I found myself nodding in agreement to so much of what you wrote in this post. I, too, have been waiting for that little magic spark that habit elicits.